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[Frank Heart] said that the thing he most remem­bers about build­ing the ear­ly ARPANET was it was real­ly an amaz­ing effort by a few peo­ple. It shows what can hap­pen when you put togeth­er a very tal­ent­ed group of focused peo­ple, and they can real­ly accom­plish an amaz­ing amount of things.

Bob couldn’t make it today. And if he could tele­port here—I mean that’s tech­nol­o­gy for the future—he would have been here this evening, but he con­tin­ues to pur­sue his vision of improv­ing con­nec­tiv­i­ty among peo­ple, and com­mu­ni­ca­tions envi­ron­ments that enable that.

We’ve already been through sev­er­al sit­u­a­tions where new tech­nolo­gies come along. The Industrial Revolution removed a large num­ber of jobs that had been done by hand, replaced them with machines. But the machines had to be built, the machines had to be oper­at­ed, the machines had to be main­tained. And the same is true in this online envi­ron­ment.

The Soviet expe­ri­ence sug­gests some­thing real­ly impor­tant for us today, which is that net­works are entire­ly com­pat­i­ble with sur­veil­lance. And many of our favorite things to talk about, then, peer‐to‐peer pro­duc­tion, or end‐to‐end intel­li­gence, kind of missed the point that I think is now obvi­ous. That whether you’re the NSA or Google or who­ev­er else…you’re a gen­er­al sec­re­tari­at, seek­ing to pri­va­tize our pow­er, and you are sur­veilling us, because you have a net­work in place.

Hacking sci­ence and space explo­ration isn’t just about get­ting excit­ed and mak­ing things. But it’s about get­ting excit­ed and mak­ing dis­rup­tive­ly acces­si­ble things. Things that real­ly dis­rupt the cur­rent state of sci­ence and a lot of the elit­ism around it, and tru­ly make it acces­si­ble for every­one.

Where did the Internet come from? And in order to answer that ques­tion, you would have to have a pret­ty clear idea of what you mean when you say ​“the Internet.” I sus­pect that if we were to poll every­body in the room, we would have a vari­ety of dif­fer­ent, some­times con­tra­dic­to­ry, some­times incom­pat­i­ble, some­times over­lap­ping, def­i­n­i­tions of ​“the Internet.”

What I’d like to do for prob­a­bly the next 40 to 45 min­utes is just first of all talk about how Reading Writing Interfaces as well as the Media Archaeology Lab under­lie my next/current project that I’m call­ing ​“Other Networks,” which will lead me into an expla­na­tion of my kind of mys­te­ri­ous title ​“There Is No Internet.” And I’ll fin­ish with talk­ing about spe­cif­ic exam­ples of oth­er net­works. When I say ​“oth­er net­works” I’m talk­ing pri­mar­i­ly about net­works that were out­side or before what we now call The Internet.